Chapter 2Cheerfulness and Happiness · Humour and Seriousness

Sense of humour? It is the salt of existence. Without it the world would have got utterly out of balance — it is unbalanced enough already — and rushed to blazes long ago.

* I am not aware that highly evolved personalities have no sense of humour or how the person can be said to be integrated when this sense is lacking; “looseness” applies only to a frivolous levity without any substance behind it. There is no law that wisdom should be something rigidly solemn and without a smile.

* Whatever seriousness is necessary must come of itself from within. To be serious outwardly by rule is not needed.

* Why on earth should people not be serious if they want? Life may be a joke, — though all do not find it so — but one can’t be laughing at it all the time. The idea seems to be that one can’t be serious unless one is either (1) in a rage, (2) discontented, (3) sad and miserable. But surely one can be serious when one is thinking or when one is looking at serious things or simply and purely when one is not laughing. And one can’t be laughing 24 hours without stopping, — the muscles of the stomach would not stand it and even the American record makers might shy at such a test.

* What you write about X is quite correct. It is not necessary to be always serious of face or silent in doing the Yoga, but it is necessary to take the Yoga seriously and silence and inward concentration have a large place. One can’t be all the time throwing oneself outward if to go inside and meet the Divine there is one’s aim. But that does not mean that one has to be grave and gloomy all the time or gloomy a big part of the time, and I don’t suppose the sadhaks here are like that. It is X’s rhetorical way of putting his difficulty — the difficulty of a vital that wants to throw itself always outward in action and emotion while another part is dissatisfied with the result and feels that its own movement is frustrated. There are two people in him, one wanting a life of vital expansion, the other an inner life. The first gets restless because the inner life is not a life of outward expansion; the other becomes miserable because its aim is not realised. Neither personality need be thrown away in this Yoga; but the outer vital one must allow the inner to establish itself, give it the first place and consent to be only an instrument of the soul and to obey the law of the inner life. This is what X’s mind still refuses to understand; he thinks one must be either all gloomy and cold and grave or else bring the vital bubble and effervescence into the inner life. A quiet, happy and glad control of the vital by the inner being is a thing he is not able as yet to conceive.